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ALP Tutorial: Watermarking in PicMonkey & WordSwag

Well, hello there! Mary here again, and welcome back to your watermarking tutorial with Autumn Lane. Last week, we covered Photoshop and Lightroom. This week, let’s talk about a few other ways we can get that gorgeous new logo of yours onto some of your branding, images, and products — however you want to watermark your thing-a-ma-jigs.

Since Photoshop and Lightroom aren’t available to all of our clients — and let’s be real, the learning curve is pretty steep — we’re going to focus on a beginner graphic design program, and an app that you can use for watermarking on the go. We’d highly recommend learning & investing in Photoshop or Lightroom for best results, but we realize that it’s not feasible for everyone.

Ready to get started? PicMonkey Watermarking

The best place to start is www.picmonkey.com — then click on “Design like a pro” because why not?!

So, this is where I went ahead and picked an image from the Gold Pink Set in the stock photos section, consistency is key after all! It takes a minute, so you’ll see these gears hang on while it does it’s monkey thing…

Oh, just wait… you’ll see what monkey thing I’m talking about!

LOOK! MONKEYS! I think… King Kong was a gorilla, so maybe not. Cute little branding pull there on PicMonkey’s side. Well done, and memorable.

I went with the choice they suggest, because they know what they’re doing — it would probably be easiest for someone with little to no graphic design experience to go with the recommendation. Right? Right. So, read what your options are – Jack, Bubbles or King Kong.

Side note: Take a look at that little yellow button/flag/banner — I’m doing this under “free trial,” so just know they offer a free trial. I’m pretty sure without doing any research on this matter that I can gamble PicMonkey has paid accounts to use their services, so before you decide this is your place of watermarking, just make sure you know what you’re getting set up for. Or hopefully at this point, you’ve been using them and know your way around a little bit!

Alright, I’ve got my layers up in the corner.

We’re going to click on the BUTTERFLY — on the left side, five down under the Tt — this is where we’ll get what we need to create a decent watermark.

Click, and then click on My Computer — see where I’m going with this?! Navigate to your logo.

Grab your logo and go ahead and open/choose that image…

BOOM!

Now you’ve got your logo on your image. You can leave it like this and use it on websites or social media. Or let’s scroll on to watermark time!

On the right side, by the color bar you’ll see FADE, move that slider as you see fit to change the opacity of your logo.

Here I moved the window for the overlay so I could resize the logo and put it down in the corner. To resize, click the little corner and move it how you see fit. Voila! You now know how to watermark in PicMonkey!

After this, I clicked saved and it prompted me to start my free trial, or consider a subscription. See?

Pretty easy-peasy.

Watermarking for Mobile – WordSwag

Some of our clients have mentioned that they don’t have a desktop or laptop at home, and they do most of their business from a mobile device, like a tablet or a phone. That means you’ll need to have an app for watermarking your images available, and we’ve found WordSwag, which is available on both Apple and Android devices. Just a note — WordSwag is a premium app (it’s not free) but the cost to use this app is minimal compared to the convenience that it provides users on the go, and compared to alternate solutions (like Photoshop or Lightroom). Although WordSwag supports overlaying text that you type on your mobile device onto an image, we’re going to be talking about actually putting your logo onto your image — it’s pretty badass for an app!

I’m a fan of the user-friendly structure of WordSwag, and I’ve got an awesome trick to being able to use a logo in this app.

READ THIS PART CAREFULLY, you need to understand where you’re saving your logo from. We’ve found that you cannot save your logo to your camera roll, and use it with transparency here. Seriously, saving you a headache! 😉 In order to use your logo, you need to make sure you’ve got your transparent .PNG file saved to Dropbox (or similar cloud storage) and have Dropbox on your phone. You’ll be able to upload your logo from Dropbox and maintain transparency. I’ll explain below…

Here we go! Alright, you’ll open up WordSwag, and then choose your image that needs watermarking.

You’ll click on the text — just do a “.” for starters. WordSwag will prompt you to write more, but continue anyway — we don’t want anything but the dot.

I find that “Fresh” is a good one because it’s small enough, make it the color necessary to blend in (I went with black) then I moved it up into the laptop. You could easily just move it slightly off the screen. (Similarly, you can use the transparency slider and then adjust the transparency slide. Per WordSwag’s website, the app isn’t necessarily designed to add only a logo image, which is why you need this little work-around.) AND SAVE.

Yup, there it is. See it… “Add Logo” — click that, this is where it’s going to suggest it’s a transparent backdrop. This is where you’ll navigate & select your logo from Dropbox.

Select your logo, and it’ll appear on your image! You’ll be able to change the size, transparency, and placement. Don’t forget to save! Voila! Now, you know how to use this app to watermark your image on the go!

I also like that once you’ve used the logo, the next time you go to add it, it’ll already have it waiting to be used. WordSwag is perfect for making cute things to share on Facebook or Instagram, or your blogs. We’d suggest grabbing one or more sets of stock images so that you can upload those to your Dropbox, select them, and then overlay your own inspirational or motivational messages for social media. Don’t forget to brand them with your logo, too!

[Note: We’ve mentioned Adobe products, like Photoshop and Lightroom, in this post. We’ve also mentioned PicMonkey, and WordSwag. We are not affiliated with any of these entities, and receive no benefit from their mention.]

ALP Tutorial: Watermarking in Photoshop & Lightroom

Hi everyone! Mary here with a tutorial — this is part one of two in the Watermarking series. One of the questions that we get asked pretty frequently is how to use your logo as a watermark, or how to place it on images, so we’re going to take you through that process. This post will be about Photoshop and Lightroom, two programs we highly recommend for tech-savvy business owners!

When you get your logo, you’ll receive varying file types. PNG is the file type you want for watermarking in Photoshop + Lightroom. Super easy process here — download the file, save it where you want access to it (I always recommend backing up either on an external or an online photo source like Dropbox) and get ready to learn how to watermark your images.

Let’s back up really quick — why are we going to talk about watermarking and what benefits are there to doing so to our products and images?

Why Use a Mark?

I’m glad you asked, or well… I asked myself pretending to be you, that works too right? Good, glad we agree!

So we watermark our images/products to protect our brand. It doesn’t need to be crazy up in your business watermarking — although, sometimes that is valid, as a photographer my watermark is pretty obvious in the galleries to prohibit someone from saving the images via a screencap. But subtle watermarking is like your little own calling card that this product is yours, these images belong to you and hey, look at my cohesive brand that is seen across the board and on my products. So badda-bing, badda-boom that’s an easy way to understand watermarking!

Now… Let’s get back to saving the PNG file! You’ve got it saved off in a location that you’ll remember? Great. Let’s move on.

Photoshop

Open up Photoshop, open up the image you want to watermark. I’m using an image from the pink stock photo sets to also help with variable coloring between light and dark. You’ll also need to go ahead and open up your logo. So you’ll have two files open, your image and your logo — just like below!

So this is where things get fun and easy, simple and clean.

You’ll go ahead and select the marquee tool (it’s that lovely little dotted square to the left second one down) head over to your logo and pull the marquee tool around to make sure you get the entire logo in the dancing ants. Clearly, fancy technical terms are in abundance when I’m at the keyboard! 😉 Now, copy it! CTRL or COMMAND C will do it for ya!

Once you’ve copied the logo you’ll head over to your image, clickity-click on that bad boy.

This part is easy, just hit CTRL/COMMAND V. You’ll also find it under edit on the top menu, we’re basically using a shortcut for paste. Your logo will pop up onto your image.

CTRL/COMMAND T (under edit, Free Transform is what we’re looking to do, Command T is the shortcut) will create a box around your logo, and this’ll be how you resize to what you’re looking for on your image. You could leave it big and fancy like above (great for social media or default images) or you can hold down shift (this will lock the dimensions), click a corner, and drag to resize to what you’re looking for to protect your images.

Right above LAYER 1 (your logo) you can see the opacity of your image, move that slider around until you reach a level of satisfaction on the visibility of your watermark. I tend to keep my watermark on the less visible side. I find that 25% is a good “Hey this is my logo but also look at my beautiful work!” percentage.

Then go ahead and use the move tool (“v” on your keyboard) and you can place the watermark where you want it!

Also, if you want another way that isn’t just pulling down the opacity, you can do that with the window next to the opacity, I tend to preference overlay which kind of fluctuates the opacity of the logo depending where it’s sitting. I moved the logo onto the notebook to show you the opacity on a darker color to show how you can still see the logo, it’s subtle but visual.

Viola! You now know how to watermark using Photoshop.

Lightroom

Now let’s give everyone a demonstration on watermarking with Lightroom, another great Adobe program that has a nice user-friendly way to do this.

With Photoshop you have a lot more control on where the logo goes, with Lightroom you will have the ability to quickly add your logo to several images.

Alright, so let’s start by saving the logo and opening up Lightroom. You’ll load your logo here. I’m going to go ahead and make an assumption of basic Lightroom knowledge on importing your image/products. This might be edited and updated at some point to walk through using Lightroom. Until then, basic knowledge is required of Lightroom!

Let’s talk a bit about the benefits of using Lightroom for watermarking.

It’s quick, you set it up once and boom, it’ll be applicable to sets of images at a time. It’ll be seamless and the same on every image set you export. It’s a time-saver. Photoshop gives you a lot of control on size/where the watermark goes, but Lightroom gives you the freedom of time but you relinquish some control on where the logo goes (it’s not like it decides for you, however we’ll get to that in the photos and what that means).

Alright, so you’re going to select the images you want to watermark/export for use. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ve selected one. Makes it a bit simpler! Alrighty, head over to FILE — you could shortcut (CTRL/COMMAND + SHIFT + E).

We’re going to do a bit more assuming that you’ve exported files from Lightroom before, so all your settings are set the way you’ve got them and they’re being saved to a folder of your choice, so you’ll scroll down until you reach watermarking! This is where we’re going to mess with settings.

Go ahead and click on edit watermarks…

You should see one of the files selected and the above window. Now, you could easily just add some text to your images as your watermark, but that wouldn’t really be cohesive and seamless with your brand/logo. So we’re going to do Image Options and upload our logo instead of using text!

Oh look, there we are! Now scroll down to Watermark Effects.

You can mess around in here for the opacity, size and where it’ll be at. So go ahead and anchor it to a corner, center, top, whatever suits your fancy and your needs. Keep in mind, when exporting sets where your logo will be at and how it will be visible (opacity, size, etc) will be important to the set of images you’re exporting with the watermark. You can use horizontal and vertical above anchor to slight adjust where exactly the image is anchor to. After that, click SAVE and give your logo a name (ALP_watermark — you can make a few different logos, white/black/blue and in different areas so that you can choose which works best for the set of images you’re using, this is all entirely preference at this point and time consuming up front but a game changer for productivity later on).

You’re done! Throw some confetti around hit ‘Export’ and go to your folder to check out the groovy logo on your set of images. You are now proficient in watermarking in Photoshop AND Lightroom!! Throwing out a virtual high five for hanging in there and learning some new skills!

We’re always available to answer questions! And we love show and tell, feel free to share your newly watermarked products! Cheers!

[Note: We love our Adobe products, but we are not affiliated with Adobe in any way.]